Brazilian Women in the Sports Press: a Case Study

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Brazilian Women in the Sports Press: a Case Study View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Alicante Original Article Brazilian women in the sports press: a case study JORGE DORFMAN KNIJNIK1 , JULIANA STURMER SOARES SOUZA2 1School of Education and Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia 2Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Brazil ABSTRACT Knijnik JD, Soares de Souza JS. Brazilian women in the sports press: a case study. J. Hum. Sport Exerc. Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 12-26, 2011. The media is a powerful tool in creating sports legends. However, international studies have proved that the media tends to favor male athletes and their feats and neglects female sports players. The main purpose of this paper is to determine how many articles one of the most important daily newspapers in Brazil published about male and female athletes. The data was gathered over a number of months at the beginning of this decade. The analysis demonstrated that men usually are mentioned much more frequently than women, that journalists tend to write more about the appearance of female athletes than about their real talents for sport. The findings lead to the conclusion that gender inequality in sport in Brazil is common and that the media, instead of contributing to the decrease in levels of gender inequality, is contributing to this inequality in wider society. Key words: BRAZILIAN SPORT PRESS, FEMALE ATHLETES, GENDER INEQUALITIES. 1 Corresponding author. University of Western Sydney. School of Education. Bankstown Campus. Locked Bag 1797. Penrith South – DC. NSW 1797. Australia. E-mail: [email protected] Submitted for publication July 2010. Accepted for publication November 2010. JOURNAL OF HUMAN SPORT & EXERCISE ISSN 1988-5202 © Faculty of Education. University of Alicante doi:10.4100/jhse.2011.61.02 VOLUME 6 | ISSUE 1 | 2011 | 12 Knijnik & Soares de Souza / Brazilian women in the sports press JOURNAL OF HUMAN SPORT & EXERCISE INTRODUCTION Brazil is known world-wide as the ‘soccer country’. However, soccer today is still mainly a sport for men, a sport in which women do not generally participate, or participate only as spectators or supporters. Recently, even though soccer continues to predominate, other sports have been attracting the interest of the Brazilian population, such tennis, volleyball and basketball. The number of Brazilians playing or supporting different kinds of sports is increasing, and among them, women are more and more involved with a range of sports, playing different roles, from supporters to athletes, from managers to coaches. A clear indication of the increasing participation of women in Brazilian sports is the number of female athletes playing in major sports tournaments. In 1980, at the Moscow Summer Olympic Games, there were only 15 female athletes in Brazil’s Olympic team; twenty years later, at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, there were 94 women, comprising more than 40 percent of the Brazilian delegation. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, women athletes made up nearly 50 percent of the country’s delegation: 122 women athletes. Despite these figures, which would suggest a wholly positive development in terms of gender equality, it must be noted that the female athletes are still subjected to gender-specific standards of behavior regarding their bodies and sexuality. Stereotypes are reinforced by the way the media often broadcast sports news covering women, not focusing on the talents and achievements of women athletes but, rather, focusing on perceived sensuality and beauty, and even in ‘femininity’. On this point, the main question of this study is: how have women athletes portrayed in the media? Did they have any prominence in the media? And if they do, in what ways have they been portrayed? Is the press’s treatment of women similar to that given to men and their tournaments, or the opposite, favoring old gender stereotypes and focusing on the women’s appearance and neglecting their athletic capacities? The media can create positive images of athletes as part of their coverage of sport, helping individual athletes to develop a positive image and in the process helping them to attract sponsorship. It is, therefore, important to assess how the media portrays women athletes; media images of these women can also influence children and teenagers and their engagement in the world of sport. The authors would argue that women who are part of this world should be able to receive the same amount of attention and exactly the same treatment from the media as male athletes. The objective of this research, then, is to study and highlight gender relationships in Brazilian sports as conveyed in the media. The discussion is based on quantitative data gathered from the sports section of one of Brazil’s most important daily newspapers, the Folha de São Paulo. To achieve this objective, the strategies used in this research were to: - check how many articles the Folha de São Paulo dedicated to female and male athletes; - verify the length of the articles; and - verify how often the reporters make comments about the gender of the athletes. In accordance with international studies as well as the objectives of this research, the authors have put forward three hypotheses: H1- It is expected that the number of articles regarding male participation in sports is larger than that about the female participation; VOLUME 6 | ISSUE 1 | 2011 | 13 Knijnik & Soares de Souza / Brazilian women in the sports press JOURNAL OF HUMAN SPORT & EXERCISE H2- It is expected that the length of the articles covering male athletes is longer than those that concern female athletes; H3- It is believed that in the articles concerning women in sport, more comments about gender and appearance may be apparent than in those dealing with men. Media and social representation The press, also known as the Fourth State in democracies (after the Judiciary, Legislative and Executive), exerts a strong influence in many aspects of our lives. Through its presentation of all kinds of images and texts – photographs, jokes, articles, cartoons - the media plays a crucial role in the development of opinions and ideas about all aspects of society, reinforcing social representations of events and people which may or may not be factual. The media is the agency that ‘chooses’ what facts and people are going to be noted by the public. This is a brutal process; according to Lobo (2003:15), ‘if something was not diffused, it did not exist’. Politics, business, love affairs, educational programs - everything is filtered and decoded by the media. Subjects such as gender relationships are also covered and prejudice against those that do not conform to standardized social patterns can be intensified. Notions of masculinity and femininity are also displayed by the media. Pathways on how to be a man or a woman are continually being normalized by the media. Even with the perceived decrease of homophobia and the increase of pro-feminist thinking in Western countries, the mainstream media still showcases men and women in contrasting ways, and especially in its coverage of sport. Sports and the media Sport is considered by Castellani Filho (1997) as one of the most important cultural phenomenon of modern times, and that is why it has a strong presence in the press. The relationship between sport and media is clear. Almost everything that happens in the sports world is quickly made public, reaching huge numbers of people avid for news about their favorite sports (Vargas, 1995). There are hundreds of sports related magazines, newspapers, TV channels, websites and radio programs. As a consequence, people are highly influenced by what the media broadcasts, as the majority of the information they receive about sports is from the TV, or from surfing the internet or reading newspapers (Koivula, 1999). This link between sport and the public is so central that sports organizations, leagues and even individual athletes are subject to the demands of the media in order to attract support from respectable companies. Media and sports are interdependent, since sport sells media and media sells sport. The relation between sports and the press is based on mutual financial benefits. According to a survey by Clarke and in 1984, two thirds of newspaper readers would like to read more about sport. The advantages for sports include free advertisements and coverage that attracts more potential consumers to their products (Urquhart & Crossman, 1999). 14 | 2011 | ISSUE 1 | VOLUME 6 © 2011 University of Alicante Knijnik & Soares de Souza / Brazilian women in the sports press JOURNAL OF HUMAN SPORT & EXERCISE Without media coverage, the financial benefits that come from sports spectators would be much more limited. Information in the media about sports events generates wide public great awareness, and it is this that drives the sale of tickets, concessions, parking lots and teams' trademarked products (Coakley, 2001). Even capturing such notability in the media, the media sports coverage still displays women and men in unequal ways. The media focuses on such things as thee frequent controversies regarding female athletes’ uniforms, for example when leading sports managers declare or even require that the female uniforms should be more ‘sensual’, even if these uniforms can jeopardize the performance of women athletes. The media is also capable of promoting role models, turning athletes into idols for thousands of children and teenagers who imitate these idols when expressing emotions and interests. The media can also support involvement in sport through programs which stimulate participation and oppose the increasingly sedentary nature of modern life. Girls and women, however, have few idols or examples, because the efforts and achievements of successful female athletes are mostly ignored by the media. This lack of exposure leads to the general perception that women are not important or deserve attention (Toohey, 1997).
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